Come sempre molto efficace nella scelta dei titoli, il settimanale The Economist ci ha appena informato che lo scontro tra i mercati (obbligazionari) e la Federal Reserve (e tutte le altre Banche Centrali) è iniziato. Adesso, e da qui in poi, sarà “Mercato delle obbligazioni contro Federal Reserve”, proprio come dice il titolo qui sopra.

Ricorderete che noi ne scrivemmo ormai un anno fa, ed anche prima, per la precisione fino dal 2015. Ci siamo ritornati poi anche un mese fa.

Il tema diventa di massima attualità oggi, nel momento in cui sui mercati delle obbligazioni si registrano una serie di reazioni, negative,

Per ricostruire con voi questo tema, e comprenderne le implicazioni per i nostri e vostri portafogli titoli. facciamo un passo indietro e ritorniamo al 3 novembre scorso, prima dell’ultima riunione della Federal Reserve. Leggiamo che cosa ne scriveva il New York Times.

By Jeanna Smialek and Eshe Nelson

Nov. 3, 2021Updated 10:20 a.m. ET

Tangled supply chains, rising costs for raw goods and soaring consumer demand have combined to push prices rapidly higher in many wealthy countries, prodding central banks around the world to start dialing back some of the extraordinary economic support measures they put in place during the pandemic.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve is expected to on Wednesday announce a plan to slow its large-scale asset purchases, a process its officials want to complete before lifting interest rates down the line. Increasingly, markets expect the Fed to start to lift interest rates from near-zero in the second half of 2022.

The Bank of England is even further along: Investors expect it could raise its main interest rate as soon as Thursday. And in Canada, Australia, Norway and elsewhere, monetary authorities have also begun to dial back support or lay the groundwork for a step away from policy help.

The shift away from full-blast economic stimulus comes amid a burst in inflation that has no 21st century precedent. Price gains had been chronically weak for decades, but this year, they have rocketed above the 2 percent rate that most advanced economy central banks target, partly as government relief helped families to spend on everything from houses to furniture.

At the same time, supply has been limited after factories shut down to contain the spread of the coronavirus and shipping routes struggled to respond to rapidly changing consumption patterns. The combination has caused prices to move higher in many places. In the United States, inflation came in at 4.4 percent in the year through September.

Britain’s annual rate of inflation was 3.1 percent in September, and is expected to peak above 4 percent in the coming months. Supply bottlenecks have been exacerbated by Brexit, which has raised trade barriers and contributed to European Union workers leaving the country throughout the pandemic. And in the eurozone, inflation came in at 4.1 percent in October, matching the highest-ever rate of inflation for the bloc.

The Bank of England might become the first major central bank to raise interest rates if it meets investor expectations on Thursday. Andrew Bailey, the central bank’s top official, said the rate of inflation was concerning and that policymakers needed to prevent high inflation from becoming permanent, but the decision on Thursday is likely to split the nine-person monetary policy committee as some members haven’t expressed as much certainty that rates need to rise.

The path forward for the European Central Bank isn’t as clear cut. Last week, Christine Lagarde, the president of the bank, said higher inflation and supply chain bottlenecks would last longer than expected in the region, but would eventually ease over the course of 2022. Financial markets were wrong to expect an increase in interest rates next year, she added, because longer-term inflation expectations remain below the E.C.B.’s target.

European policymakers have taken a small step to prepare for the end of emergency-levels of support. Last month, they slowed their pandemic-era bond buying program, attributing the change to an improved outlook for the economy and higher inflation expectations.

Other central banks have been more blunt about their concerns. The Bank of Canada abruptly ended its bond-buying program last week and signaled that it could raise interest rates sooner than expected, as the forces pushing prices higher proved to be stronger and more persistent than anticipated.

Understand the Supply Chain Crisis

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Covid’s impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high.

Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules.

First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them — like computer chips — and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers.

Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up at ports. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam.

No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year’s Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist “likely well into next year.”

Norway’s central bank has already lifted interest rates and is expected to raise them again in December. The Reserve Bank of Australia announced this week that it was ending its program to cap rates on certain types of debt, citing “earlier than expected progress” toward its inflation target.

U.S. policymakers are preparing to dial back their own bond-buying program in part because doing so will leave their policy in a more nimble position: Officials still expect inflation to fade substantially with time. If it does not, some policymakers want to be done with the bond purchases and in a position to raise interest rates to counteract heady price gains.

The inflationary moment confronting global central banks comes as a surprise. Many had spent years battling tepid inflation, trying to figure out how to coax price gains back to the levels that lay the groundwork for dynamic economies. That situation has rapidly reversed — many still expect the burst of pandemic price pressure to fade, but how quickly and how completely that will happen is perhaps the biggest question in global economics.

“The risks are clearly, now, to longer and more persistent bottlenecks and thus to higher inflation,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said recently, adding that the Fed was “in a risk management business, not one of absolute certainty.”

Jeanna Smialek writes about the Federal Reserve and the economy for The New York Times. She previously covered economics at Bloomberg News

L’articolo qui sopra ci aiuta a ricostruire lo stato delle cose sette giorni fa, all’inizio della settimana scorsa. Una settimana che, come vedremo insieme, è risultata per numerosi aspetti una settimana decisiva.

Con il titolo che vedete qui sotto (che risale addirittura allo scorso mese di agosto), facciamo nel Post un accenno al tema della liquidità dei mercati finanziari: un tema al quale noi la settimana scorsa abbiamo dedicato ogni giorno la Sezione Operatività, per mettere i nostri Clienti sull’avviso dei cambiamenti in corso.

Cambiamenti che, ovviamente sui quotidiani ed a CNBC non vengono neppure presi in considerazione.

La riunione della Federal Reserve della settimana scorsa era molto attesa: ai mercati era stato anticipato che Powell avrebbe annunciato la riduzione degli acquisti di obbligazioni sui mercati (ovvero il “tapering”: si temeva ala reazione dei mercati obbligazionari, al punto che, proprio nelle ore immediatamente precedenti la conferenza stampa di Powell, il Tesoro degli Stati Uniti ha annunciato ai mercati che nei prossimi mesi emetterà un quantitativo INFERIORE di obbligazioni a medio e lungo termine.

Una (ennesima) prova concreta della totale politicizzazione della Federal Reserve, ormai parte integrante del governo politico e per nulla “Autorità indipendente”.

Come vedete qui sotto, la settimana scorsa l’indice che misura la volatilità dei prezzi delle obbligazioni USA ha toccato un livello “da piena pandemia”.

Il grafico che vedete qui sotto ci offre una lettura del medesimo dato su un periodo di tempo più lungo: come vedete, l’attuale livello di volatilità (75, nel grafico qui sopra) è molto significativo, se messo a confronto con i livelli toccati in precedenti periodi di tensione.

Se siete interessati a comprendere i dati che presentiamo in questi grafici, e più in generale che cosa sta accadendo intorno a voi, e quello che accadrà nelle prossime settimane, vi sarà quindi utile, e forse indispensabile, approfondire: potete farlo leggendo l’articolo che segue, che è appunto l’articolo di The Economist a cui abbiamo fatto cenno in apertura.

L’articolo si apre con l’affermazione che “Le Banche Centrali negli ultimi due anni hanno fatto da “secondo violino” alle scelte dei Governi”, come noi abbiamo scritto poco più sopra, e poi spiega perché nella seconda parte del 2021 sono invece finite in prima fila, e quindi esposte come dicevamo allo scontro con i mercati finanziari che è iniziato in queste ultime settimane.

In un altro Post, sempre datato oggi, ci soffermiamo poi sui primi episodi di questo scontro.

For much of the past two years, central bankers have found themselves playing second fiddle to governments. With interest rates in the rich world near or below zero even before the pandemic, surges in public spending were needed to see economies through lockdowns. Now central bankers are firmly in the limelight. During the past month, as inflation has soared, investors have rapidly brought forward their expectations for the date at which interest rates will rise, testing policymakers’ promises to keep rates low.

The expected date of lift-off in some countries is now years earlier. In the last days of October Australia’s two-year government-bond yield jumped from around 0.1% to nearly 0.8%, roughly the level at which five-year bonds had traded as recently as September, prompting the central bank to throw in the towel on its pledge to keep three-year yields ultra-low. The bank formally ditched its policy of yield-curve control on November 2nd, though it said it would wait for sustained inflation to emerge before raising interest rates.

On October 27th the Bank of Canada announced the end of its bond-buying scheme (though it will still reinvest the proceeds of maturing securities). The bond market had already reached the same conclusion before the announcement, and is pricing in a small interest-rate increase over the next year. Investors’ expectations for rate rises in Britain have ratcheted up dramatically (see chart). As we wrote this, the Bank of England was due to decide whether to raise its policy rate.

Such moves have been mirrored in America and the euro area, albeit on a smaller scale. The Federal Reserve announced a tapering of its asset purchases on November 3rd. That had been widely expected, but the move index, which tracks the volatility of American interest rates, has this month hit its highest level since the early days of the pandemic. On October 28th Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, pressed back against market expectations that interest-rate increases could begin as soon as the second half of 2022, noting that an early rise would be inconsistent with the bank’s guidance. That failed to stop two-year German bond yields inching up the day after, to their highest level since January 2020.

The movements so far are not large enough to constitute a bond-market tantrum on the scale of that seen in 2013, when the Fed also announced a taper. But the fact that the mood is much more febrile than it has been for most of this year reflects the uncertainty over the economic outlook, particularly that for inflation.

Whether the markets prove to be right on the timing of interest-rate rises or whether central bankers instead keep their original promises will depend on how persistent inflation looks likely to be. Central bankers have said that price rises so far are transient, reflecting an intense supply crunch. But some onlookers believe that a new inflationary era may be on the way, in which more powerful workers and faster wage growth place sustained pressure on prices. “Instead of decades in which labour has been coming out of people’s ears it’s going to be quite hard to find it, and that’s going to raise bargaining power,” says Charles Goodhart, a former rate-setter at the Bank of England.

Recent moves also highlight the sometimes-complex relationship between financial markets and monetary policy. In normal times central bankers set short-term interest rates, and markets try to forecast where those rates could go. But bond markets might also contain information on investors’ expectations about the economy and inflation, which central bankers, for their part, try to parse. Ben Bernanke, a former chairman of the Fed, once referred to the risk of a “hall of mirrors” dynamic, in which policymakers feel the need to respond to rising bond yields, while yields in turn respond to central banks’ actions.

All this makes central bankers’ lives even harder as they try to penetrate a fog of economic uncertainty. Yet there is some small relief to be had, too. If investors thought inflation had become sustained, instead of being driven largely by commodity prices and supply-chain snarls, yields on long-dated government bonds would have begun to move significantly. So far, however, investors have dragged interest-rate increases forward rather than baking in the expectation of permanently tighter monetary policy. The ten-year American Treasury yield, for instance, is still not back to its recent highs in March.

Furthermore, some bond markets are still calm. In Japan, consumer prices were just 0.2% higher in September than a year ago, and are still in deflationary territory once energy and fresh food are stripped out. The Bank of Japan’s yield-curve-control policy remains in place, contrasting with the collapse in Australia. Setting policy is a little easier when investors are more certain of the outlook. That, sadly, is not a luxury many central bankers have. ■

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Fight the Fed: adesso lo scontro è aperto

Understand the Supply Chain Crisis